Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2023

We received 25 eligible submissions for the prize. The diversity and quality of the nominated expositions and the interest of the creators is evidence of the development of the Research Catalogue and its use for documentation and presentation of artistic research and for supervision. This year we saw an increased number of exhibitions that present artistic research at the level of master’s degree programs.

The nominated expositions testify to different approaches to using the Research Catalogue as a tool for group research, interdisciplinary research, individual research and to a great effort to use its possibilities.

 

The prize aims to foster and encourage innovative, experimental new formats of publication and to give visibility to the qualities of artistic research artefacts.

The jury consisted of Paulo Luis Almeida on behalf of the Portal Partners, Timo Menke as one of the prize winners 2021, and Blanka Chladkova on behalf of the Executive Board of SAR. We agreed that the exposition “On the Indeterminate Training Technologies of a Reconstructed Bauhaus Choreographer. A Research Practice Between Speculative Histography, Architectural Invention, and Performative Co-enactment” by Thomas Pearce met these aims to an exceptionally high level. He is followed by Emma Cocker (et al.) with her exposition “EXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space” on the second place and Torben Snekkestad (et al.) with his exposition “Traversing Sonic Territories (TST)” on the third place.

 

1st place: Thomas Pearce

The jury was impressed by the exposition “On the Indeterminate Training Technologies of a Reconstructed Bauhaus Choreographer. A Research Practice Between Speculative Histography, Architectural Invention, and Performative Co-enactment” that is multi-layered and complex. It re-enacts a series of performance-based events that reconstructs the life of a fictional choreographer, in five instances. It relates the topography of the performing place with the topography of the screen in a novel way, presenting the reconstruction process and providing insights into the research underlying practice. The exposition mirrors the combination of several methods used in the performative research. Navigation allows users to connect the acts of the performance with the exhibition pages in a backward design: we enter the resulting piece and follow its reconstruction.

A fundamental benefit is interdisciplinarity, in addition to the innovative and precise solution to the form of exposition, the interdisciplinary nature, the author’s dialogue with his own solution and the author’s discussion of the ethical limits of the research subject should also be appreciated.

2nd place: Emma Cocker et al.

Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, Vidha Saumya

The exposition “TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space” (by Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin) represents collaborative score-based approaches to live, situated writing and reading practices. The exposition explores different agencies of language-based practices, combining direct and indirect voices from the group. The navigation in the exposition creates parallel paths between document, reflective review and insights. Overall, the exposition organises a complex web of relationships between place, language, performative reading, collective agencies. The exposition uses excellent navigation in very clear design. In view of the large research team, the successful aim to document the process should be appreciated.

 

3rd place:
Soren Kjærgaard & Torben Snekkestad

Søren Kjærgaard & Torben Snekkestad, challenges the idea of sonic identity by practice sharing of audio material and improvisation processes in his exposition “Traversing Sonic Territories (TST)”. it is not easy to convey a sound presentation in RC compared to other visual and graphic tools. The author copes with this predicament through design, navigation and illustrative visual elements and enables us to think about sonic identity, the idea of personal sound.